1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to machines for filling bags with bulk material and more particularly to an automatic machine for hanging empty bags upon a bag filling machine in proper position and without causing damage thereto.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
Many bulk materials, such as cement, grain, chemical compounds, livestock feed mixtures, and the like, are commonly placed in bags for commercial handling. Several machines have been devised for automatically filling bags with bulk material, the majority of such machines including a hopper in which the bulk material is placed. The empty bags, which may be of paper, cloth, a synthetic material, or any combination of these, is then placed below a filling spout on the hopper, and the spout is opened to permit the desired quantity of material to enter the bag. The present invention is directed to an automatic machine for removing an empty bag from a stack and properly placing it under the filling spout of such a bagging machine, and to associated bag handling apparatus.
The collapsed empty bags have been stacked horizontally or vertically. The bags have been removed from the front of the vertical stack or from either the top or bottom of the horizontal stack. The bag hanging machine of the present invention is constructed to store a supply of collapsed empty bags in a stack positioned between horizontal and vertical and to remove each bag from the bottom of the stack. The transfer arms of the invention are arranged to pick the bottom bag from the stack and to hang it vertically below the filling spout of the bagging machine. The present machine is an improvement over earlier machines in that the bag magazine can be easily loaded from the top with a large number of bags and the bottom bag of the stack can be quickly opened and transferred from the magazine to a filling spout without causing damage to the bags.